Lord Polak: My Lords, I pay tribute to all the speakers before me, particularly the noble Lord, Lord True, who is not in his place. On an occasion like today, I think I speak on behalf of the whole House when I say we miss the late Lord Sacks, who would have known exactly what to say.
On hearing of someone’s passing, the Jewish tradition is to say “Baruch dayan ha’emet”, which means “Blessed is the true judge”. In my earliest memories of going to synagogue on a Saturday morning, there was only one prayer that was said in English, and that prayer will be said tomorrow in synagogues up and down the country. I will read it as it was done last week: “He who giveth salvation unto kings and dominion unto princes, whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, may he bless our sovereign Lady Queen Elizabeth and all the Royal Family. May the supreme King of kings, in his mercy, preserve the Queen in life, guard her and deliver her from all trouble and sorrow.” In synagogues up and down the country tomorrow we will say it as usual for His Majesty King Charles.
I have been listening to so many personal stories of how Her Majesty touched the lives of so many, even just for a fleeting moment, and that will forever be  etched on the memory of those people. In 1971 my mother and my late grandmother were at Royal Ascot. My grandmother at the time thought she was part of the Royal Family and we did not tell her that she was not. On the way back from the paddock to the enclosure, my grandma Leah touched the back of the Queen Mother and said, “Ma’am, you look beautiful.” As the heavies suddenly came round to where my mum—who was deeply embarrassed—was, the Queen Mother said, “Hang on”, and turned to my grandmother and said, “And, if I may say so, you look beautiful too.” At this point both embarrassed daughters, Her Majesty the Queen and my mother, turned round at the same moment and said, “Oh mummy.” This moment, this 10-second encounter, stayed with my late grandmother her whole life, and has stayed with my mother to this day.
The tributes to Her Majesty have all been magnificent, but I listened particularly carefully to Sir John Major, the former Prime Minister, whose tribute included the line, “There was almost no part of the world she had not visited.” Sir John was right. I will concentrate for a moment on the word “almost”. On 22 June 2016, the night before the EU referendum, I was at a small dinner with a few people raising a little bit of money for Gordonstoun at the home of the Princess Royal. As I was leaving, I said to the headmaster that I would happily come up to the school and speak to the students about politics. Princess Anne turned round and said, “I think they’d be more interested in your previous work.” We had a conversation and discussed how the Royal Family were prohibited by the Foreign Office from visiting Israel. We agreed that it was and is sad that the Queen, as someone who was deeply religious and God-fearing, never walked down the Via Dolorosa into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, visited the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem or experienced the peace and tranquillity on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.
At a Jewish funeral, Psalm 116 is often recited in Hebrew. In translation, it ends:
“You will make known to me the path of life;
In your presence is fullness of joy,
at your right hand bliss for ever more.”
Yehi zichra baruch—may Her Majesty’s memory be for a blessing.

Lord Wolfson of Tredegar: My Lords, I begin, in accordance with the custom of my religious tradition, with an acknowledgement that, as mortal humans, we submit to God’s decree and from his judgment, whether that be for life or for death, there is no appeal: “Baruch dayan ha’emet”—“Blessed be the Judge of truth.”
As I say that blessing, I am taken to the last time I met Her Majesty. I recited a different and special blessing, the blessing our rabbis prescribed to be said when meeting royalty: “Baruch shenatan michvodo lebasar vadam”—“Blessed is He who has shared His glory with mortals of flesh and blood”. The idea in that blessing is not the divine right of kings; it is not the absolutist notion that, because monarchs derive their power from God, they cannot be held accountable for their actions. The blessing embodies a totally different idea, but it is a powerful one. It is the idea, as the Talmud puts it, that “royalty on earth is to reflect royalty in heaven”; that to be royal requires the highest standards and impeccable behaviour. It is an idea, I suggest, that Her late Majesty exemplified throughout her long reign.
Noble Lords might be familiar with the Hebrew word “mitzvah”. “Well done for doing this or that,” you might hear somebody say, and they will add, “You’ve done a mitzvah”—you have done a good deed. But a mitzvah is not a good deed which you do because you are in the mood or because the urge takes you; it is not something you do only and if you feel  like it. The Hebrew root of the word mitzvah, its  basic etymology, is the word “tzav”, which means “commandment”, “order” or “duty”. You do a mitzvah not just because it is a good deed and not just because you feel like doing it; you do a mitzvah because it is your duty. Her late Majesty spent her whole life doing the right thing and not just because she felt like it or because the mood took her. She spent her 96 years doing the right thing, day in, day out, out of a sense of duty. It was a life, if I may respectfully say, of mitzvah, of acting out of a profound sense of personal duty and under the solemn oath to God which she took at her Coronation.
In Hebrew, every letter also has a numerical value and you can add up the values of individual letters to get the value of a word. In one of those coincidences which perhaps are not, the numerical value of the Hebrew word tzav, the root of the word mitzvah, is 96: 96 years of tzav, of duty, and also of mitzvah, of doing the right thing because that is your duty.
Tomorrow is Shabbat and, as we have heard from my noble friend Lord Polak, in synagogues up and down the country we will say the prayer for the Royal Family, as we do each and every week. We recite that prayer immediately after the reading of the Torah,  the five books of the Pentateuch, from Genesis to Deuteronomy, which we read in weekly instalments throughout the year. We are well into Deuteronomy at the moment, so the current annual cycle is nearly complete, but on the day we finish Deuteronomy, we do something odd but important. We return to  the Holy Ark the scroll with which we completed Deuteronomy but we immediately take out a new scroll and start reading again from the first chapter of Genesis. So, on that day, the death of Moses, the faithful leader who had guided the people over so many decades, is immediately followed, a matter of moments later, by a new start—indeed, a new creation—in the first chapter of Genesis.
So tomorrow, for the first time in my life, we will not pray in synagogue for Prince Charles but for King Charles. I started yesterday as a Queen’s Counsel and I finished it as a King’s Counsel. We have closed one book, a long and good book which we have had with us for so many years, and we are about to open another. As we all pray that God save our King, I will also pray that he too may enjoy a reign of mitzvah, of doing the right thing, for that, now, is his duty. Baruch dayan ha’emet, yehi zichra Baruch. “Blessed be the judge of truth”, and may her late Majesty’s cherished memory be a blessing for all of us.